I noticed that, finally, you would like to change, ONLY, the lines which begin with a digit, wouldn’t you ?

If so, you can achieve all your changes, in one go, with a regex Search-Replacement !

Move back to the very beginning of your file ( Ctrl + Origin )

Open the Replace dialog ( Ctrl + H )

In the Find what: zone, type (?-s)^(?=\d)(\w+).+\W+(\w+)\W+(\w+)$

In the Replace with: zone, type \1 \2 \3 , with a space character after digits 1 and 2

Click on the Replace All button

Et voilà !!

NOTES :

As usual, the in-line modifier (?-s) ensures you the any meta-character dot ( . ) will match standard characters, ONLY, and notEOL characters

Then, the part ^(?=\d) is called a positive look-ahead, that is to say a condition which verifies that, at beginning ( ^ ) of each line, a digit ( \d ) does occur ( Note that this condition must be true, in order to valid the overall search regex. However, these look-arounds do not consume any character and the regex engine position is, still, at the very beginning of each line )

So, the part (\w+) represents the first non-null range of word characters, of each line, which is stored as group 1, due to the parentheses

Then, the part .+ stands for any non-null range of standard characters, till the regex engine reaches :

A non-null list of NON-word characters ( \W+ ), followed by :

A non-null range of word characters ( (\w+) ), stored as group 2, followed by :

An other non-null list of NON-word characters \W+, followed by :

An other non-null range of word characters ( (\w+) ), stored as group 3, finally followed by the end of the line ( $ )

In replacement, we just re-write the contents of the three groups 1 ( first word ), 2 ( penultimate word ) and 3 ( last word ), separated by one space character.

REMARKS* :

The class \w represents, in the world-common ASCII range of characters, the class [A-Za-z0-9_], ( upper-case letters, lower-case letters, digits and the low line character ) But, if your present file has an Unicode encoding ( UTF-8 or UCS-2 ), the range of word characters ( \w ), in N++, is extended to any character, considered as letter or digit, in either, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arab languages, correcty displayed with the Courrier New default N++ font !

And the inverse class, \W, stands for any NON-word character, that is to say, any chracter, which does NOT belong to the word characters range

Even if the non-selected lines begin with an othersymbol than the star, except for digits, AND/OR the different words are separated by several non-word characters, our S/R, always, behave as expected :-) For instance, if you consider the text, below, where I inserted numerous non-word characters, whose some space and tabulation characters, in the two lines, that have to be changed and where I changed the first character of the lines, which have to stay unchanged :